“What did you do? Dip your car in bleach?” she asked. “Because it smells like—” She pulled the map out and turned it over in her hands. It was a nautical map of the Willamette. “Clorox.”
He grabbed her from behind just as she reached for the door handle. She clawed at the door, but he hit an all-lock button and the electronic locks bolted into place with a mechanical thud. She scrambled to get to the button on her door handle to unlock her door, but he had a forearm around her neck and something over her mouth and nose and she couldn’t get free of him. She fought, all knees and elbows, but it wasn’t enough. He had leverage on her. She thought of all sorts of things: how she wished she’d done that story on self-defense classes; how she should have worn her shit-kicker boots, the ones with the steel toes; how she should have kept her nails long, so she could rip his fucking eyes out; how, somehow, none of this surprised her at all. She managed to get the lit cigarette up, grinding it hard into his neck until he howled and wrenched her wrist until she dropped it. She had wanted to kill him with it, but she would settle for it burning a hole through his spotless floor mat. That would be her legacy: a burn spot on an otherwise-pristine surface. Fucking perfect. It was her last thought as the darkness engulfed her.
CHAPTER
42
A nne sat on the carpet in Dan McCallum’s dark little living room, surrounded by Cleveland High School yearbooks. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. But Archie suspected Reston and she was going to find him something to move on. The books had been arranged chronologically and Anne had started with the most recent volume, flipping through the pages, hoping for something to catch her eye. Page after page of goofy club photographs, sporting events, school plays, class photos, teachers, and plaintive senior messages, and then, halfway through the 1994 yearbook, she found exactly what she was looking for. She pulled the 1995 yearbook off the shelf and searched frantically through it until she found the next picture she needed to confirm what she was thinking. It did.
She scrambled up off the floor, holding both the books cradled to her chest, and fled through the house to find Archie.
He was in the kitchen, watching as they zipped McCallum’s corpse into a black body bag and prepared to wheel him out of the house. Anne pulled him to the back stoop and thrust the first yearbook into his hands, open to the photograph of the Cleveland High School drama club. There at its center was Susan Ward, and next to her Paul Reston. Susan, fourteen years old, before the pink hair. She had not yet come into the beauty that was waiting for her. She was still an awkward-looking, thin, brown-haired girl.
“Jesus Christ,” said Archie, his color draining. “She looks like all the others.”
“Why did you suspect Reston?” Anne asked.
She could see Archie hesitate for a moment. He touched the photograph of the young Susan, as if his fingertips could somehow protect her retroactively. “Susan told me yesterday that she had a sexual relationship with him when he was her teacher. Today, she denied it.”
Anne harbored no doubt that Susan had slept with Reston when she was a teenager. “It’s him,” she said simply.
“He’s got an alibi,” Archie said, leaning against the back of the house. “We can’t pick him up based on an old photograph and a crime with a long-passed statute of limitations.”
Anne laid the next yearbook over the one he held and opened it to Susan’s sophomore-year photograph. She was a different kid from the one in the first picture. She wore a black T-shirt and black lipstick. Her eyes looked helpless and sad and hard all at the same time. And she had bleached her hair. But she hadn’t used Clairol. She hadn’t gone to a salon. She’d used what she could find under the sink. She’d used Clorox.
“It’s all about her,” Anne said. She cataloged the morgue photos in her mind, the girls’ marbled faces, their hemorrhaged corneas, the cruel yellow-orange of their once-brown hair. “He bleaches them because it completes the transformation.”
Archie’s eyes didn’t lift from the page. She could see him processing all of it. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said almost to himself. Then he looked up at Anne, his face flushed with urgency. “Where are Claire and Henry?”
“I’m here,” Claire said, coming up the back steps, cell phone still in her hand. “Jeff just called,” she said, face tense. “Reston isn’t at home. He left school at the usual time, but hasn’t come home yet. They don’t have any way to find him until he shows up. Should I have them wait?”